After weeks with largely cloudy and rainy weather, Monday was intensely sunny. Until it wasn’t. From 1:53 p.m. to 4:08 p.m., the tri-campus was in the path of a partial solar eclipse. With the eclipse reaching its peak of approximately 96.6% of totality at 3:09 pm, students and community members crowded the quads and Irish Green to observe the rare cosmic event which won't be seen again in the United States for another 20 years.
While some students drove south to experience total eclipse elsewhere in the state, others gathered on campus, pulling couches from Dillon and other dorms onto South Quad and donning eclipse glasses to take peeks at the sky during an engineering class outside Stinson-Remick Hall.
Notre Dame bought 70,000 pairs of free eclipse glasses in preparation for the eclipse, on top of months of events and planetarium shows in advance of the astronomical event. Many were warned not to view the eclipse without the glasses because of risk of eye damage, though that didn’t stop everyone.
“We’ve all sneaked a peek at the big guy,” senior Corbin Hite said.
This was North America’s second total lunar eclipse in seven years, and the eclipse made its way from Mazatlán, Mexico to Maine. Keith Davis, the director of the digital visualization theater and an associate professor of the practice in the physics and astronomy department, explained what a solar eclipse is.
“We are going to see a partial solar eclipse,” he said just as the eclipse began. “So starting a couple of minutes ago, the moon is in the right place to cast its shadow on the earth and we're going to be in that shadow.”
Kelly Harrington, a first-year advisor in the College of Science, was volunteering at the watch party at the Irish Green. She said community members had begun taking spots on the lawn at 11:45 a.m., more than two hours before the eclipse even began.
Heather Kennedy, the college’s undergraduate affairs program coordinator, was another volunteer.
“There's all ages. We've seen even like tiny little toddlers,” Kennedy said. “It's been really, really cool. People have their chairs and blankets.”
Davis said the eclipse was responsible for a gradual dimming on campus, but because of the exposed 3% of the sun, it wouldn’t be truly dark on campus.
“So it’ll feel fairly sudden, but it's a constant motion,” he said.
Davis added there are other experiences as part of the partial eclipse, including the shimmer and shadows.
“During the later parts, when much of the sun is covered, you will see what are referred to as shadow bands. So we think that turbulence above in the high atmosphere is taking that little sliver of sun and kind of diffracting it, making the shadows a little weird,” he said.
Davis also mentioned any space with a small hole is always projecting an image of the sun, which took a different shape on Monday afternoon.
“Most of the time you don't notice it because it's a round image of the sun and it just looks like anything. But if you take like a colander and hold it out, you will have a bunch of projections of the little that whatever curvature is blocked. So you'll see that little crescent shape and a whole bunch of little projected images. It's pretty cool,” he said.
Davis emphasized a lot of work went into planning the event.
“I'm so excited that there's so many people here and I'm so excited that we have a nice, clear, beautiful day. So I just want people to have a good time, [to] view it safely or learn a little about how the sun and the moon and the earth move and how that creates the world that we experience,” he said.
